CON VERSUS 
KESPEARE 

IRGE SEIBEL 



^ 



Bacon 

versus 
Shakespeare 



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Bacon versus 
Shakespeare 

PTho Wrote the Plays? 



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By GEORGE SEIBEL 



Pittsburgh 

The Lessing Company 

1919 



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Copyright, 1919, by 
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TO MY BOOKBINDER 

Bind me my books in stuffs and hues that mean 

Something, not in a mute and formal guise ; 

Let every cover hide some keen surprise 
To shadow forth the volume's soul unseen ! 
Habit good Whitman in a garb of green ; 

Red gold for rare old Plato, dreamer wise ; 

A mouchoir for my Musset*s streaming eyes ; 
Spenser the gossamer robe of faerie queene. 

And bind my Wycherley in hide of swine ; 

My Burns in homely borrel, stout and strong ; 

A crazy-patch Verlaine*s absinthine song, 
And royal purple Marlowe's mighty line ; 

But — nothing else were fit to case him in — 

Bind up Will Shakespeare in a human skin ! 



If we wish to know the force 
of human genius, we should 
read Shakespeare. If we wish 
to see the insignificance of 
human learning, we may study 
his commentators. 

Hazlitt's Table Talk 



Did Bacon Write Shakespeare? 

TWO master minds, many centuries 
apart, have appeared upon this 
globe. In the days of Alexander 
the Great, the genius of Greece flowered in 
the analytic intellect of Aristotle. The 
mightiest synthetic brain that ever dwelt 
within the cavern of a human skull came 
in ^Hhe spacious times of great Elizabeth, '' 
in Master William Shakespeare, of Strat- 
ford-on-Avon, poacher, player, poet — 
'^master of the revels to mankind 'M 

As Aristotle could take to pieces all the 
achievements of the human race, like some 
surgeon in the dissecting-room, so Shake- 
speare, like a great architect, buihied of 
dreams and passions those lofty temples 
and towers of poetry which the tempests 
of time and the revolutions of history have 
not bereft of their grace and grandeur . 

Both of these giants have encountered 
detraction, but from different directions. 
Aristotle's philosophy, which began with 
observation and experiment, degenerated 
into futile speculation and deadly dogma. 
Remember how Galileo was persecuted be- 
cause he saw spots on the sun, which Aris- 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

totle, who had no telescope, had pro- 
nounced to be perfect. Eemember Victor 
Hngo's battle against the Three Dramatic 
Unities falsely deduced from the Poetics. 
Aristotle fell into contempt through the 
stupidity of the Aristotelians . 

The attacks upon Shakespeare have been 
of a different nature. Aside from Ber- 
nard Shaw and old Tolstoy, neither of 
whom need be taken very seriously in this 
field, no one has denied the supreme genius 
of Shakespeare. But since the day of 
Delia Bacon, a poor crazy creature who 
succeeded in enlisting the sympathy of 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, there have been 
many who have asserted, and have labored 
diligently to prove, that the great plays 
were written, not by the ignorant actor 
from Stratford, but by the erudite Francis 
Bacon, whom Pope described as ^Hhe 
wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind. '' 

Joseph C. Hart, American consul a,t 
Santa Cruz, in a book on The Romance of 
Yachting, published in 1848, was perhaps 
the earliest to question Shakespeare's 
authorship. Miss Bacon's first article on 
the subject appeared in Putnam^ s Monthly, 
in 1856, and she died, in 1859, having la- 
bored zealously to establish the delusion 
endeared to her by family pride . William 
Henry Smith, of London, in 1856 suggest- 
ed Bacon as the real author, after the 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

doubts about Shakespeare had been raised. 
Nathaniel Holmes, a Missouri lawyer, Ed- 
win Keed of Boston, and Judge Webb of 
England, are others who have wasted their 
time in the same way. Societies have been 
started and magazines have been published 
to promote the delusion, so that a bibli- 
ographer in 1884 could already enumer- 
ate two hundred and fifty-five books and 
pamphlets on the subject, and now there 
are probably nigh a thousand. Lawyers 
are especially liable to be afflicted, perhaps 
because they are fascinated by the task of 
making out a case upon slender evidence. 
It even became a popular literary diver- 
sion to find ciphers in Shakespeare's plays 
proving that Lord Bacon was the real 
author. In his youth, as a diplomat at a 
foreign court. Bacon had devised a system 
of secret writing. Out of this little 
acorn has grown a tall forest of over- 
shadowing oaks. Beginning with Ignatius 
Donnelly, a Greenback lawyer of Minne- 
apolis, and down to Mrs. Gallup of Detroit 
and Mr. Booth of Cambridge, cipher af- 
ter cipher has been found in Shakespeare 's 
plays. Evidently Bacon thought one ci- 
pher was not enough . He wished to leave 
nothing to chance. He put in so many 
ciphers that it is surprising there was room 
left for any ideas. It does not matter 
that you can use these ciphers to read 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

almost anything into Shakespeare. I 
once applied one of the codes, and discov- 
ered that Othello had been written by Bill 
Nye, who was in reality the Lost Danphin. 
That only serves to show what a marvelous 
man Bacon was . 

These cipherers assure us that Bacon 
wrote not Qjily the works of Shakespeare, 
besides those published under his own 
name, but also the works of Marlowe, of 
Greene, of Peele, some of Ben Jonson's, 
Spenser's Faerie Queene, Burton's Ana- 
tomy of Melancholy, and Montaigne's £^6^- 
says. One begins to wonder when and 
how he found time to write his own works . 
Whatever was going on in his day and gen- 
eration, no George being about, evidently 
the rule was, ^^Let Francis do it." Aston- 
ishing how much ingenuity has gone to 
seed, how much industry has been mis- 
applied, how logic has been twisted, how 
every crime, from burglary to punning, 
has been resorted to, in order to disprove 
what no sane man has ever doubted . 

However, it is a curious and diverting 
by-path of literature to follow the bizarre 
arguments evolved by the Baconians. Per- 
haps it should not be regarded strictly as 
an exercise for the literary man ; it borders 
closely upon the province of the alienist. 
Bacomania is a disease, and that some men 
of keen discrimination, like Mark Twain 

10 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

and Walt Whitman, were not immune, 
shows that any cult can secure adherents, 
if only it is absurd enough . It takes a lot 
of brains to believe some things . 

Because hundreds of books have been 
written to bolster up the absurdity, many 
otherwise rational people, without time to 
investigate the question, have come to be- 
lieve that ^^ there may be something in it/' 
So it may be well to examine a few of the 
queer and amazing arguments advanced to 
prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. 
Truly, most of these reasons hardly re- 
quire any answer, for, like ^Hhe flowers 
that bloom in the spring," they ^'have 
nothing to do with the case. ' ' Nearly all 
are based upon the supposed ignorance and 
illiteracy of Shakespeare, his progenitors 
and his descendants. Shakespeare could 
not write, runs the argument ; therefore he 
did not write the plays. Bacon could 
write; therefore he must have written 
them. 

At the outset, it is insisted with much 
fervor that Shakespeare's father could 
neither read nor write. If this were 
demonstrated beyond any doubt, it would 
prove nothing more than that Shake- 
speare's father did not write the plays. 
But the fact is that Shakespeare's father, 
who was once the chief magistrate of Strat- 
ford, could write with facility, of which the 

11 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Stratford archives afford proof. Un- 
daunted, the ardent Baconians further in- 
sist that Shakespeare's mother conld 
neither read nor write. That is merely 
another proof that Shakespeare must have 
written the plays himself, for it shows that 
his mother did not. What tremendous 
logic such contentions evince ! The mother 
of Napoleon Bonaparte never owned a can- 
non; therefore Napoleon could not have 
won the battle of Austerlitz . The mother 
of Christopher Columbus never ran a 
ferry ; therefore Columbu>5 did not discover 
America. 

Our Baconian friends, not content with 
proving Shakespeare's ancestors illiterate, 
also insist that his daughter Judith could 
neither read nor write. Shakespeare had 
another daughter, named Susannah, who 
was called ^^ witty above her sex." The 
Baconians forget to mention her, perhaps 
because they are afraid some one might 
suggest that Susannah Shakespeare wrote 
the plays. John Milton's oldest daugh- 
ter could not write, but that does not in- 
validate his claim to be the author of 
Paradise Lost. But what difference does 
it make how dull or how clever the other 
members of the Shakespeare family were? 
No one suspects or accuses them of having 
written the plays. We are concerned only 
with Master William . 

12 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

At this point the Baconian hastens to ex- 
hibit a series of Shakespeare's own auto- 
graphs — roughly scrawled and variously 
spelled. These, if they are genuine, are all 
the traces left by Shakespeare's pen — five 
badly written signatures, not a syllable 
more. 

An additional signature has been dis- 
covered by Prof. C. W. Wallace in the 
British Record Office. Baconians argue 
that this signature is not Shakespeare's, 
but the clerk's who drew up the deposition 
in the lawsuit. Careful comparison shows 
that the signature is different from the 
clerkly script and strikingly resembles the 
writing on the will. 

This paucity of papers might be hard to 
get over, if we had bales of manuscript by 
other Elizabethan writers . But from most 
of them we have not even a single signa- 
ture. As for poor writing showing ab- 
sence of genius, many a man can write 
copper-plate script, but has not a thought 
worthy of setting down. Horace Greeley 
wrote such a wretched scrawl that fre- 
quently he himself could not decipher it. 
Of course, that settles it : Horace Greeley 
never wrote any editorials in the Tribune. 

It would be very easy to manufacture 
such negative Baconian evidences by the 
bushel. The first William Shakespeare 
there is any record of was hanged for rob- 

13 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

bery in 1248 — and, of course, it will be 
readily admitted that high poetic genins 
could not flourish in a family disgraced by 
an outlaw. As three William Shake- 
speares were living in Warwickshire be- 
tween 1560 and 1614, it might be readily as- 
serted that the name was so common as to 
occur at once to Bacon when he needed a 
nom de plume, just as the well-known citi- 
zen nowadays arrested in a raid on a po- 
ker-palace invariably gives the name of 
John Smith. The Baconians have actually 
discovered one Shakespeare who was so 
thoroughly ashamed of his name that he 
had it changed to Saunders . 

Following up their assumption of heredi- 
tary illiteracy in the Shakespeare family, 
the Baconians go on to assert that Wil- 
liam must have received very scant school- 
ing. As if the plays of Shakespeare re- 
quired a profound knowledge of Latin and 
Greek, science and philosophy, historic and 
juristic lore for their writing! In truth, 
they exhibit sad lack of these things, al- 
though Shakespeare possessed a very fair 
education for that period and his station 
in life. We have letters in Latin written 
by two of his schoolmates at the Stratford 
free school; one of these lads, at the age 
of eleven, displays a very respectable 
Latinity. There is no reason for sup- 
posing that Master Will was behind his 

14 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

chums in class. They also learned the 
rudiments of Greek under a headmaster 
from Oxford. Besides these classic 
tongues Shakespeare had some French, 
a smattering of Italian, and perhaps a bit 
of Spanish. There is testimony to all this 
from his friends and companions, and it 
may be seen in the plays. At the same 
time his knowledge of these languages was 
neither extensive nor exact, as Bacon's 
was. Shakespeare knew the world better 
than books. He read the hearts of men, 
rather than the pages of dead poets and 
philosophers. Not vast learning and deep 
erudition were required to produce his 
plays, only the flash and flame of genius. 
^^I could write like Shakespeare if I had 
the mind,'' said a vain poet, and a caustic 
wit retorted, ^^You could — if you had the 
mind." As Emerson has written, ^4t is 
the essence of poetry to spring, like the 
rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the in- 
visible, to abolish the past and refuse all 
history. ' ' 

Was it not strange, if Bacon wrote the 
plays, that in one play whose plot is almost 
a free invention, he gives us glimpses and 
souvenirs of some of Shakespeare's neigh- 
bors at Stratford-on-Avon? That play is 
The Merry Wives of Windsor — and, by the 
way, it contains excerpts from the very 
Latin grammar that was in use at the 

16 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Stratford Latin School during Shake- 
speare ^s boyhood. Was it also a mere co- 
incidence that when Shakespeare had his 
Venus and Adonis printed, the first work 
to bring him prominently before the public, 
he gave the job to a printer who had come 
to London from Stratford a few years be- 
fore him I There were other printers, but 
he went to his townsman, Eichard Field. 

It is true that Shakespeare left no manu- 
scripts, and upon this fact the Baconians 
base many triumphant sneers. It is a 
great pity that we haven't a copy of Ham- 
let in Shakespeare's handwriting to con- 
fute them. But it should be very easy for 
them to produce a copy of Hamlet in 
Bacon's handwriting, should it not? In- 
deed, if Bacon had written the plays, we 
probably would have the manuscripts. He 
was not, like Shakespeare, careless of his 
literary reputation. He would have fished 
the pages of copy out of the dust-bins of 
the London printers. Perhaps also he 
would have been prudent enough to write 
on asbestos, so that the book of the play 
or the actors' parts would not have been 
destroyed in the burning of the Globe 
Theater in 1613, nor in the great fire of 
London in 1666. It would be marvelous, 
indeed, if any of Shakespeare's manu- 
scripts had escaped destruction. Of some 
contemporaries not even a printed line sur- 

16 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

vives. Eichard Hathway, highly praised 
by Francis Meres, was one of the most pop- 
ular authors of comedy, yet we have not a 
single line of one of his comedies, though 
we know the titles of sixteen. Coming to 
an even later age, no one knows where 
there is a single page of the manuscript of 
Milton's Paradise Lost. 

Besides leaving no manuscripts, it has 
been said, Shakespeare left no books. 
What of that! His library, doubtless, was 
small. It included North's Plutarch and 
Holinshed's Chronicles. We have a copy 
of Florio's Montaigne with Shakespeare's 
autograph and some notes, commenting on 
thoughts imbedded in the plays. Per- 
haps neither the notes nor the autograph 
are genuine, but the argument in their fa- 
vor summed up by Gervais is better than 
that for Bacon's so-called Promus, which 
we shall examine later. 

Having thus in various indirect ways 
cast suspicion upon Shakespeare's ability 
to write the plays, the Baconians launch in- 
to the wildest assertions with regard to 
Shakespeare's life and fame. We know 
almost nothing about Shakespeare, they 
have said so many times, that many people 
who are not Baconians have come to be- 
lieve this true. The fact is that we know 
more of Shakespeare's life than we know 
about any other poet of that age, except 

17 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Ben Jonson. We even know that Shake- 
speare ^s father was fined twelve pence for 
having a heap of dirt before his door, and 
that in 1598 the dramatist himself default- 
ed his own taxes in London. We can connt 
about three hundred references and allu- 
sions to Shakespeare in the writings of 
contemporaries between 1591 and the date 
of his death, 1616. For a mere butcher, 
brewer, and pawnbroker, as the Baconians 
depict him, this means much ! 

To say, as the Baconians do, that when 
Shakespeare died no one in England 
dreamed of mourning the death of a great 
poet, that no obituaries in prose or verse 
show he was held in high esteem, is a fab- 
rication that can proceed only from cheer- 
ful ignorance or supreme audacity. With- 
in a few years of the Bard's death, a monu- 
ment was erected to him in Stratford — 
with an epitaph whose laudatory phrases 
would have been extravagant if applied to 
any other — ^while many contemporary 
writers lament the world's loss and pro- 
phesy the dead poet's immortal renown. 

Shakespeare cannot have been dead 
more than a few years when the poet 
William Basse glorified him in a sonnet — 
naming him with Chaucer, Spenser, and 
Beaumont, who lay buried in Westminster 
Abbey, bidding them lie closer to make 



18 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

room for Shakespeare, and then deciding 
it would be more fitting that 

"In this uncarved marble of thy own, 

Sleep, brave tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone." 

Having, as they think, put Shakespeare 
out of the way by their pen-pricks, ''with 
twenty trenched gashes on his head,'' 
every cryptic utterance or allusion made 
by Bacon or his friends at any time is con- 
strued by the Baconians as a reference to 
Bacon's authorship of the plays. He once 
wrote to King James that, with a full un- 
derstanding of what he was doing he sup- 
pressed his name and genius. What war- 
rant is there for assuming that this had 
any reference to the Shakespearean plays ? 
When Bacon writes of works that would 
make his name far more celebrated than it 
was, if they were published as his own, he 
may have spoken truly, but how could they 
be published as his own if he had not writ- 
ten them I When he writes that ''I have 
(though in a despised weed) procured the 
good of all men," there is nothing to show 
he was referring to any adventures in dra- 
matic authorship. Again, when removed 
from office, he is quoted as writing to the 
Spanish ambassador that he would now 
''retire from the stage of civil action and 
betake myself to letters, and to the instruc- 
tion of the actors themselves and the ser- 
vice of posterity." Since all of Shake- 

19 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

speare's plays were written long before 
1621 — the latest being produced in 1613, 
eight years before Bacon decided to betake 
himself to letters, and thirteen years be- 
fore he died — it is impossible to establish 
any connection between this utterance and 
the genesis of the great dramas. And 
Bacon's chief claim to have served pos- 
terity is as the discoverer of cold storage, 
not as founder of a dramatic school. 

We are told that Bacon advocated the 
use of a pen-name for literarj^ men. Why, 
then, did he not publish his Essays and 
other authentic works under a pen-name? 
The same severe logicians who tell ' us 
Shakespeare's parents were illiterate, as- 
sure us that Bacon's father published a 
great deal anonymously and under as- 
sumed names. Do they wish us to believe 
that perhaps Bacon's father wrote Shake- 
speare's plays? 

They insist that Bacon's mother pub- 
lished translations from the Latin, but 
never allowed her name to appear on the 
title-page. The work she translated was 
Bishop Jewell's Apology for the Church of 
England^ and, as the worthy prelate's own 
name does not appear on the title-page, 
we cannot draw any weighty deductions 
from the absence of hers . 

Right here, however, arises another con- 
sideration . Several of the ciphers found 

20 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

by ingenious Baconians in the works of 
Shakespeare assert that Bacon was really 
the son of Queen Elizabeth. Being very 
learned, the Queen herself might have 
made those translations; if so, the monu- 
mental self-effacement of the other lady is 
accounted for. If not, and if Queen Eliza- 
beth was really Mrs. Leicester, and 
Bacon's mother, how can the fact that 
Lady Anne Bacon did not print her name 
on the title-page of a theological tract 
prove that her adopted son must have 
written the works of Shakespeare? 

Bacon wrote a prose history of Henry 
VII, which we are told fills the gap in the 
king dramas, between Richard III and 
Henry VIII . Why, if he wished to fill the 
gap, didn't he w^rite a play around Henry 
VII? Why did he leave so many other 
gaps unfilled — three Henrys, five Edwards, 
to say nothing of Richard I? 

The inconvenient little word ^Svhy" is 
the rock upon which most of the Baconian 
arguments go to pieces. Do they really 
deserve to be called arguments? Because 
in The Merry Wives of Windsor^ Mistress 
Quickly says, '' Hang-hog is Latin for 
Bacon," and because Bacon's crest was a 
boar with a halter, and because ' ' Ham-let ' ' 
may be a diminutive derivative of a pig, 
we are expected to doubt all the plain tes- 
timony of Shakespeare's friends and 

21 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Bacon's. As John Fiske said, ^^By such 
methods one can prove anything.'' 

Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, a fierce 
Baconian, produces a queer line of argu- 
ment from As You Like It. In Touch- 
stone, "the courtier who is playing 
clown," he recognizes Bacon. '' Notice 
that Touchstone refuses to be married to 
Audrey (who probably represents the 
plays of Shakespeare) by a Mar-text^ and 
she declares that the Clown William ^has 
no interest in me in the world.' William 
— shall we say Shakespeare of Stratford? 
— enters, and;" — but why go on with this 
far-fetched fancy, which to the Baconian 
type of mind is close-knit reasoning. 

Another staggering argument asserts 
that thirty-two obituaries written on 
Bacon laud him as the greatest of drama- 
tic poets. Is it not strange that a secret 
so widely known should have been so 
sacredly kept until a crazy American wo- 
man guessed it after two hundred years 
or more? Of course, it is admitted that 
obituaries and epitaphs always tell the 
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 
truth. Many a man whose endorsement 
was not worth thirty cents during his life- 
time, might borrow a fortune in any bank 
if he could come back with his tombstone 
as evidence of his high standing in the 
community. 

22 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Those odes, written about Bacon after 
he had died, were collected by his friend 
William Rawley. In one of them the 
Muse of Tragedy exclaims, '^Give me back 
my Apollo!" Since Apollo never wrote 
any comedies or tragedies, how could this 
mean that Bacon did? Another ode calls 
Bacon ^^Quirinus'' — a Latin word which 
may be twisted to mean ^ ^ Spear-Shaker. ' ^ 
Romulus, the founder of Rome, was like- 
wise called ^^Quirinus;" are we to deduce 
that he wrote Julius Caesar f Another ode 
in the collection calls Bacon ^^Pinus,'' 
which also, we are told, means ^'Shake- 
Spear.'' Now ^^Pinus" means '^ pine- 
tree,'' and by metonymy, since spears were 
made of pine-trees, it was sometimes used 
for ' ' spear, ' ' but certainly it did not mean 
'^ Shake-Spear." ^^Pinus" in the same 
way means ''ship;" did Bacon write 
Mother SMpton's Prophecy 1 It also 
means "torch;" did he write Rostand's 
Aiglon and portray himself as Flambeau? 
Such is Baconian reasoning — it almost in- 
clines one to believe the Baconians have 
little Latin and less common sense. 

Dean Williams extols Bacon as ''the 
greatest pride of the Muses and the Apollo 
to the Chorus." Up to date the Nine La- 
dies from Helicon have not been heard 
from in regard to the matter. George 
Wither addresses Bacon as "Chancellor 

23 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

of Parnassus'' — ^which to the Baconians is 
fraught with tremendous significance. If 
some one had called Bacon door-keeper of 
the universe, the Baconians would scent 
therein an allusion to the Globe Theater. 

But one of the references most fondly 
cited by the Baconians should effectively 
dispose of all the claims that Bacon wrote 
Shakespeare's plays. Doctor Sprat said of 
him in 1607 : ^ ^ I am sure he does the work 
of twenty men. ' ' Evidently Bacon was far 
too busy all his life to write thirty-seven 
plays ! 

The waggish poet of a Chicago newspa- 
per has satirized the Baconians in an 
amusing poem entitled Bacon's Busy Day: 

Sir Francis Bacon rose at five 

And said : *'As sure as Fm alive, 
Tve got to get a move on me 

If ever famous I shall be." 
He nibbed his quill, and fixed his ink, 

And rubbed his head, and tried to think; 
And then, like gathering blackberries, 

He wrote J. Caesar's Commentaries. 

To while away an hour he wrote 

The Pilgrim's Progress, with a note 
To the effect that Bunyan should 

Be called the author, if he would; 
Then, yawning ere he should begin, 

He wrote a work on medicine. 
And, just to save a lot of pother. 

He named Hippocrates as author. 

24 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Then to his breakfast, but between 

The grapefruit and the ham 'twas seen 
He scribbled still, by fits and jerks, 

The most of old Josephus' works; 
Then, smoking, with his long legs crossed. 

Wrote Paradise Regained, and Lost, 
And Scottish Chiefs, while as a solo 

He sang the works of Marco Polo. 

*Tm lazy," sighed he, '^what's the use?" 

And wrote the books of Mother Goose; 
Then penned, to start his cipher steps. 

The diary of Samuel Pepys ; 
R. Crusoe's thrilling tale was next 

To leave his pen with flowing text. 
And then, to please his maiden auntie, 

He wrote the rampant rhymes of Dante. 

The works of Virgil then he penned, 

And Homer's verse, from start to end; 
Then Fox's Martyrs, and a bit 

Of quaint Aristophanic wit — 
And then all day he worked like sin 

To put the hidden ciphers in. 
That night, with many a splashy shiver, 

He sank all this beneath a river. 

One Bacomaniac makes exultant refer- 
ence to a statement by Jonson that Bacon 
''filled up all numbers/' which is said to 
mean that ''he wrote poetry in every con- 
ceivable meter. ' ' As the works of Shake- 
speare do not contain poetry in every con- 
ceivable meter, it would seem reasonably 
certain that Jonson was thinking of some- 

25 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

thing else. Bacon wrote verses. Most 
competent critics who have read them 
agree that they are not poetry at all, but 
badly rhymed prose. Eead the poems as- 
cribed to Bacon, and you will never sus- 
pect him of Romeo and Juliet or Timon of 
Athens. After scanning the paraphrases 
of some Psalms that Bacon published, one 
is sure he never penned the sublime pray- 
er of Lear nor the torrential passion of 
Antony and Cleopatra. What if Jonson 
did call him the greatest word-painter in 
the English language? If it were sober 
truth, instead of delirious adulation, it 
would not prove that he had written Shake- 
speare. 

Parallel thoughts by the thousand are 
found in Bacon and Shakespeare — by the 
Baconians. When other people examine 
these parallelisms, they sift down to a 
score or so. There are more parallels be- 
tween Shakespeare and almost any other 
Elizabethan poet than between Shake- 
speare and Bacon. At most, such parallels 
are only proof that Shakespeare had read 
Bacon, or that Bacon had read Shake- 
speare, or that both had read in the same 
authors . 

Superficial resemblances between the vo- 
cabulary of Bacon and that of Shake- 
speare really have very little significance. 
The vocabulary of all Elizabethan writers 

26 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

is very much alike. Bacon uses many 
words that Shakespeare used; but Shake- 
speare uses many words that Bacon never 
knew . 

Bacon, who almost thought in Latin, 
whose literary style was modeled upon 
Tacitus and Cicero, lacked the airy aban- 
don of Shakespeare's unpremeditated art. 
Doctor Rawley said of him: ^^ Neither was 
he given to any light conceits, or descant- 
ing upon words, but did ever purposely 
and industriously avoid them. ' ' Would he 
have let Hamlet make his first bow with a 
pun? Shakespeare plays with words as 
with colored balls, tossing them carelessly 
about; Bacon counts them carefully like 
golden coins. Not so the Baconians. 

As has been said before, even puns be- 
come potent arguments in the Baconian 
armory. We are told to look at Bacon's 
signature. After the ' ' B " there is an in- 
terval and ^^acon" standing all by itself. 
We are told that ^^acon" is Greek for 
^^ javelin" — ^that it is an obsolete word de- 
scribing a peculiar sort of spear. The 
word is not ^^acon,"*but ^^akontium;" it 
was not obsolete, and there is nothing pe- 
culiar about it except the use to which it is 
put by the Baconians. The appropriate 
answer to this whole argument is furnished 
by Doctor Johnson: ^^A man that will 



27 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

make so poor a pun will not hesitate to 
pick a pocket. ' ' 

There is yet worse to come. Bacon was 
Baron of Vernlam ; ' ' veru " is a Latin word 
meaning ^^ spear/' and the old English 
word ^4am'' is equivalent to '^ shake.'' 
All through the plays of Shakespeare, even 
in Hamlet, are many puns, but none quite 
so vile as this hybrid ; therefore we cannot 
believe that the man who perpetrated the 
^^Verulam" atrocity was the same that 
wrote the plays. 

The Baconians are also very fond of 
scanning title-pages of early editions of 
Shakespeare's dramas, finding in the 
arabesques the syllables ^^Ba" and ^^con." 
These mystic scrolls are usually visible 
only to Baconians, who are as adept as Po- 
lonius at descrying anything suggested to 
them in the clouds of their fantastic theory. 
It never occurs to them that the syllable 
^^Ba" may be an expression of contempt 
for the ' ' con, ' ' a slang term for a swindle, 
of which they are the victims . 

A head-piece exhibited by the Baconians 
shows a bag and the figure of a ^ ^ cony, ' ' the 
Old English name for the rabbit. Can it 
be that Bacon also wrote Wild Animals I 
Have Knoivn, which is commonly attribut- 
ed to Ernest Thompson Seton, and the 
Uncle Remus tales a gullible generation be- 



28 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

lieved were written by Joel Chandler 
Harris? 

One of these Baconians has declared that 
some title-pages labeled with the name of 
Shakespeare are adorned with a head- 
piece flanked by birds for "B,^^ and in the 
center are the letters ^^acon'' — ^together 
constituting ' ' Bacon. ' ' Only a little more 
ingenuity would be needed to prove clearly 
that Bacon wrote the works ascribed to 
Audubon. The birds give us the clue. 
Pray note that both names end alike, and 
that four letters of Bacon's name are in 
the name of Audubon. Many Baconian 
arguments are built upon less solid foun- 
dations. 

Perhaps all this may explain Robert 
Greene's bitter diatribe against Shake- 
speare — ^^an upstart crow, beautified with 
our feathers." Indeed, this passage is 
often pointed to as proof that Shakespeare 
was masquerading in borrowed plumage. 
Since Greene was complaining that the 
feathers had been plucked from himself 
and his friends, he does not make a very 
good witness for the Bacon claimants — ^be- 
fore an intelligent jury. 

Now comes the weightiest evidence of 
all. If a man admits a crime, his convic- 
tion would appear to be certain. Bacon, 
in a letter to the poet Sir John Davies, 
asked him '^to be good to all concealed 

29 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

poets. ^ ^ If Bacon was a poet, he concealed 
it so effectually that the greater part of 
the world has not yet discovered him. 
Spedding, the best of Bacon's editors and 
biographers, has deliberately written : 

''If it could be proved that Shakespeare 
did not write the plays, I should believe 
that any one else had written them sooner 
than Bacon." 

That is the testimony of the man who 
knew the subject better than any other 
modern critic. He was familiar not only 
with Bacon's life, but also with every line 
Bacon had written, and he was one of 
Bacon's most loyal admirers. Yet he as- 
sures us that he believes Bacon was alto- 
gether unqualified to produce the plays as- 
cribed to Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the 
Baconians, because Bacon mentioned ''con- 
cealed poets, ' ' are ready to believe that he 
wrote The Tempest and The Winter^s 
Tale. When on another occasion, having 
written a sonnet to greet Queen Elizabeth, 
he excused its defects by saying, "I pro- 
fess not to be a poet," this is regarded as 
double-dyed dissimulation and accepted as 
circumstantial evidence to clinch the case. 

"Trifles light as air" are to the Baco- 
nians "confirmation strong as proofs of 
Holy Writ." They insist that Bacon, in 
the midst of his prose, often dropped into 
poetry and even into rhyme. So did Silas 

30 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Wegg — shall we accuse him of the Ode to 
a Grecian Urn? 

Not satisfied with Bacon's own confes- 
sion, the Baconians summon his secretary, 
who testifies that ^^ everything he wrote 
sounded like poetry.'' That secretary 
would have made a fine press agent. He 
deserves more credit for admiring loyalty 
than for literary discrimination. No won- 
der Bacon, in his last will and testament, 
left him five hundred pounds! Still, it 
will be readily admitted that even Bacon's 
poems sound like poetry, though they are 
not. 

And now comes Sir Tobie Matthew, a 
great traveler, Bacon's literary friend, his 
successor in Parliament. Sir Tobie, we 
are told, wrote to Bacon that 'Hhe greatest 
of all poets bears your lordship's name, 
though he be known under another. ' ' The 
exact words of Tobie Matthew are as fol- 
lows : 

^^The most prodigious wit that ever I 
knew of my nation and of this side of the 
sea, is of your lordship's name, though he 
be known by another . ' ' 

Being written on the continent, th.is could 
only mean that Matthew had there met 
somebody whose name was Bacon, though 
he went under another. There was such a 
man on the continent at the time — a learn- 
ed Jesuit known as Thomas Southwell, 

31 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

whose real name was Bacon. Matthew, a 
recent convert to Catholicism, was very 
likely to be thrown into just such society, 
and to form an extravagant estimate of 
such a man. So much for Sir Tobie ! 

With regard to the publication of Shake- 
speare 's plays, some amazing statements 
are made — as, for instance, that the great 
majority first appeared anonymously. A 
few did appear anonymously, but none ap- 
peared without Shakespeare's name after 
his great fame had been established, 
though fhey were pirated and printed 
without his consent. Indeed, his popu- 
larity was so great that booksellers as- 
cribed to him many dramas that were not 
his; and despite the allegations of the 
Baconians, Shakespeare thought enough of 
his literary reputation to make a bookseller 
upon one occasion remove his name from 
the title-page of a spurious work. This 
was a poem, The Passionate Pilgrim — 
his dramatic works he does not appear to 
have regarded as real literature, but rather 
as a journalist of our day might view his 
ephemeral pot-boiling editorials . 

If it is contended that the plays re- 
mained anonymous until 1600, even as to 
the entries in the Hall of Records, we 
might point to Lady Anne Bacon, who 
omitted her well-known name from the title- 
page of a very popular work. The truth is 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

that Love's Labor's Lost, probably Shake- 
speare's first play written alone, was print- 
ed in 1598 with his name on the title-page. 
The first play printed that we know of, 
Romeo and Juliet, had appeared only one 
year earlier, in 1597. Francis Meres, 
writing in 1598, knew no less than twelve 
of Shakespeare's plays, and attests that 
their authorship was widely known. ^^The 
Muses," he says, ^' would speak Shake- 
speare's fine filed phrase, if they could 
speak English. ' ' 

After Shakespeare's popularity had be- 
gun, the booksellers never omitted his 
name. On the title-page it was spelled 
Shakespere or Shake-speare. In the 
authentic autographs we have, the name is 
spelled S-h-a-k-s-p-e-r-e, minus an ^^e" 
and an ^ ^ a. " Much has been made of this 
by the Baconians, but at most it proves 
only that the piratical booksellers may not 
have known how to spell the name of the 
man whose property they had stolen. 
People at that time spelled phonetically — 
according to the Go-as- You-Please Spelling 
rediscovered by Andrew Carnegie and 
Prof. Brander Matthews, the Great Simpli- 
fiers . This being so, the name of Shake- 
speare 's father, found sixty-six times in 
the Stratford registers, is there speUed 
sixteen different ways. Surely the name 
of Sir Walter Kaleigh was well known; 

33 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

yet his name in contemporary documents 
is spelled in about forty different Avays. 
He himself spelled it sometimes Rardey 
and sometimes Ralegh — jet he was one of 
the learned men of that age. 

Curious and recondite hints about 
Bacon's authorship of Shakespearean 
plays are discovered everj^vhere — ^by the 
Baconians. In the First Folio of 1623, the 
last comedy but one is As Yon Like It: the 
title of the last but one of Bacon's Essays, 
we are told, also reads As You Like It. In 
order to realize how baseless and irrele- 
vant this argument is, remember that the 
First Folio was published by a printers' 
syndicate and some of Shakespeare's actor 
friends, so that Bacon had nothing what- 
ever to do "wdth the arrangement of the 
plays. As for an essay of such title. 
Bacon's works fail to reveal it. 

It is worth noting, because of the pecu- 
liar light it sheds upon the mathematical 
processes of Bacomania, that in this enu- 
meration one is asked to count backward, 
starting from the end of the whole of 
Bacon's Essays and from the end of the 
first division of the plays in the Folio. It 
is a fundamental principle of Bacomania 
that you begin to count am^vhere you like, 
so long as you end where you wish. One 
arithmetical Sherlock Holmes discovers 
profound significance in the fact that An- 

34 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

tony and Cleopatra is the tenth tragedy, 
and that the tenth essay of Bacon likewise 
deals with Antony's mad infatuation for 
Cleopatra. This time the count begins 
at the beginning of the complete Essays 
and at the beginning of the second division 
of the plays. Bacon merely mentions An- 
tony and his affinity in the essay, which 
has no relation whatever to Shakespeare's 
tragedy. But from a little molehill such as 
this, a Baconian easily makes a Chimbo- 
razo. The word ^'honorificabilitudinitati- 
bns," in Lovers Labor ^s Lost, has been 
made the basis of computations like those 
by which crazy millennarians fix the pre- 
cise date of the world's end from the books 
of Daniel and Revelation. 

Edwin Bormann, a German humorist 
who perpetrated an unconscious master- 
piece in a book on the Baconian theory, 
declares that whenever Francis Bacon had 
time on hand, volumes of Shakespeare 
were published. How Herr Bormann found 
out when Bacon had nothing to do, is not 
quite clear. Probably by reverse reason- 
ing he deduced that Bacon had nothing to 
do whenever plays by Shakespeare made 
their appearance. According to all his 
biographers. Bacon led a very busy life; 
one of them, as we have seen, says ^^he 
did the work of twenty men. ' ' The Shake- 
speare Quartos began to appear in num- 

35 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

erous editions from 1597 to 1611, in the 
very years when Bacon should have been 
most occupied. No new plays were pro- 
duced after Shakespeare's death in 1616, 
though Bacon lived ten years longer, and 
toward the last had practically nothing to 
do, having in 1621 retired from public of- 
fice in disgrace. 

The statement that during the five clos- 
ing years of Bacon's life a number of new 
Shakespearean dramas were published is 
based upon the fact that many of the plays 
in the First Folio of 1623 are there printed 
for the first time. It is certain, however, 
that they had been written and performed 
long before — and as we have seen, Bacon 
had nothing to do with their publication. 
Heminge and Condell, actor friends of 
Shakespeare, remembered by him in his 
will, caused the Folio to be printed, seven 
years after his death, as a monument to 
his memory. Every one who knows the 
story of the First Folio, the most precious 
book in the world, a copy of which would 
bring at auction twenty thousand dollars, 
knows that no better proof of Shake- 
speare's authorship could be adduced. 
Has any other poet ever had a memorial 
to compare with the First Folio? 

Arguments based upon certain of the 
plays deserve some consideration. It has 
been pointed out, for instance, that Henry 

36 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

VIII could not possibly have been written 
in its present form before 1621, whereas 
Shakespeare died in 1616. In the scene 
showing the dismissal of Cardinal Wolsey, 
the two gentlemen who acted in Wolsey's 
case do not appear ; in their place are the 
four nobles who in 1621 came before 
Francis Bacon to demand that he surren- 
der the Great Seal of the Eealm, after he 
had pleaded guilty to charges of corrup- 
tion and bribery. The four nobles re- 
ferred to are the Dukes of Norfolk and 
Suffolk, the Earl of Surrey and the Lord 
Chamberlain. We might well ask whether 
there were no earlier Dukes of Norfolk 
and Suffolk, whether the Earl of Surrey 
and the Lord Chamberlain were inven- 
tions of Bacon? But that would not re- 
move a peculiar coincidence. The dif- 
ficulty is cleared up when we recall that 
Shakespearean scholars are practically 
agreed that only a few scenes of Henry 
VIII are by Shakespeare; Fletcher and 
Massinger likely have written the rest. 
So the point raised becomes one of minor 
moment . But we also know that the play 
was acted in 1613, when the Globe Thea- 
ter was burned down by a fire caused by 
discharging cannon during the perform- 
ance; hence attempts to connect it with 
Bacon's disgrace eight years later are 
somewhat far-fetched. If any alteration 

37 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

was made in the cast, Ben Jonson, who 
was friendly to Bacon, may have done it 
at a later revival, for the sake of the sym- 
pathy to be enkindled by such an allusion. 
Bacon, after his disgrace and fall, wrote 
the king a letter in which he compared him- 
self with the great cardinal. ^^ Cardinal 
Wolsey said" — these are Bacon's words — 
^^that if he had pleased God as he pleased 
the king, he had not been ruined. My 
conscience saith no such thing. But it 
may be if I had pleased men as I have 
pleased you, it w^ould have been better 
with me.'' In these words the Baconians 
detect a startling similarity to Wolsey 's 
oft-quoted lines: 

"Had I but served my God with half the zeal 
I served my king, He would not in mine age 
Have left me naked to mine enemies.'* 

This similarity, at most, would prove that 
Bacon had read or seen Shakespeare's 
play, and quoted from it imperfectly. But 
as the words are actually Wolsey 's own, 
recorded by George Cavendish in his life 
of the Cardinal, written before either 
Shakespeare or Bacon was born, not even 
this faint contact can be established . Ac- 
cording to Cavendish, Wolsey said: ^^If I 
had served God as diligent^ as I have 
done the king, he would not have given me 
over in my gray hairs. " Shakespeare is 
more faithful to the record than Bacon. 

38 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Two literary finds have been used as 
props for the Baconian theory — the so- 
called Promiis and the ^^Northumberland 
Manuscripts. ' ' 

Mrs. Pott, a more industrious than in- 
genuous exponent of the Baconian the- 
ory, came across the memorandum-book 
now known as the Promus. It is assumed 
that this memorandum-book was owned by 
Bacon, and it is broadly alleged that it 
contains notes afterward used in Hamlet 
and Romeo and Juliet. To call the Promus 
a memorandum-book is the first piece of 
presumption. It is merely a school-boy ^s 
copy-book, and has no apparent connection 
with either Bacon or Shakespeare. 
Eduard Engel examined the Promus, 
which is in the British Museum, and ex- 
pressed the opinion that it contains the 
scribblings of three different school-boys. 
Bacon's hand-writing does not resemble 
any of the three. Aside from proverbs in 
Latin and English, the profound thoughts 
which it contains consist of phrases like 
^^Good-morning!'' ^^Good-evening!" and 
similar commonplaces. Moreover, Mrs. 
Pott has apparently resorted to deliberate 
misreading to score a point. She has sub- 
stituted for the plainly legible word 
^^vane," at the end of a Latin quotation, 
the word ^^rome," in order to secure a re- 
mote resemblance to the word ^^Eomeo." 

39 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

The expressions ^^ golden sleep'' and ^^up- 
rouse'' are found in the Promus; they also 
occur in Romeo and Juliet. This, to Mrs. 
Pott, is proof conclusive that the Promus 
was Bacon's note-book in writing Romeo 
and Juliet. To the Shakespearean scholar 
nothing could be more ridiculous, more 
transparent, than this Promus humbug. 
Before it can be used to prove anything 
about either Bacon or Shakespeare, some 
one must prove that Bacon wrote it or had 
anything to do with it. 

A somewhat more interesting problem is 
presented by the ^^Northumberland Manu- 
script," discovered at Northumberland 
House in 1867. This was a packet of 
miscellaneous manuscripts by various 
authors — Bacon, Shakespeare, Nash, and 
others. On the title-page the names Wil- 
liam Shakespeare and Francis BaCon are 
written side by side over a dozen times. 
Only a few of Bacon's own manuscripts 
remained in the packet; of course it would 
not occur to the Baconians that the owners 
of the other manuscripts might have come 
to claim them. In one part of the manu- 
script, where Richard II and Richard III 
are mentioned, the name of Francis Bacon 
has been crossed out, and the name of Wil- 
liam Shakespeare substituted. What does 
this indicate except that whoever wrote the 
index of the contents had made a mistake 

40 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

and corrected it? The Baconians find a 
deep significance in the crossing out of 
Bacon's name. They wonld have an ar- 
gument of real weight if Bacon's name had 
not been crossed out, or if Shakespeare's 
had been crossed out and Bacon's put in. 

Coming to the portraits of Shakespeare, 
the Baconians are in clover. We are told 
that the Folio edition of the dramas has the 
author's portrait, and that this does not 
in the least resemble Shakespeare's bust 
in Stratford Church. We are also in- 
formed that the Shakespeare of the Folio 
wears the costume of a courtier. 

The costume has little to do with it. 
Shakespeare was an actor, and may have 
worn costumes of various kinds. He was 
a court favorite, and may very well have 
worn court dress when at court, or the art- 
ist may have invested him with a new suit. 
Rodin has made a perfectly nude statue of 
Victor Hugo, but it does not follow that 
Victor Hugo walked about the streets of 
Paris unadorned. 

The Droeshout engraving in the Folio is 

accompanied by ten lines of verse in which 

Ben Jonson tells the reader to 

"Look 
Not on his picture, but his book." 

The meaning of this is very plain. The 
book was Shakespeare himself; the picture 
but a poor representation of him. Nobody 

41 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

but a Baconian could possibly misunder- 
stand what Jonson meant. A Baconian 
can misunderstand anything. 

Both this portrait and the Stratford bust 
— whitewashed, repainted, restored every 
now and then — ^were crude and inartistic 
attempts at a posthumous likeness. We 
know how little the newspaper cuts of our 
day resemble the originals — many of them 
would justify the victim in a libel suit. In 
Shakespeare's age, the artists were even 
less adept and less conscientious, and Mar- 
tin Droeshout was just beginning his ca- 
reer. Other Shakespeare portraits by 
Janssen, Soest, Gilliland, Donford, and 
others, are all painted from tradition, not 
from life. That any of all these pictures 
resemble one another or the Stratford bust 
is more remarkable than that they differ. 

What is known as the Chandos portrait 
bears a slight likeness to the portraits of 
Bacon, observable mostly by Baconians. 
This portrait was once owned by Sir Wil- 
liam D'Avenant — the same who, as a boy,^ 
spoke of Shakespeare as his godfather, and 
was warned by some village wiseacre not 
to take the name of God in vain. D'Ave- 
nant's brother, who became a parson in 
later life, used to tell with pride that when 
he was a child, Shakespeare had given him 
^^a hundred kisses" on visits to their 
father's inn. In his youth D'Avenant 

42 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

must have seen Shakespeare often, and 
this would justify the belief that the 
Chandos portrait must have been a good 
likeness. This applies also to the Shake- 
speare bust at the Garrick Club in London ; 
this bust came from D^Avenant's theater, 
and was likely made from the Chandos 
portrait. A superficial resemblance to 
some of Bacon's portraits surely can have 
no bearing upon the question who wrote 
the plays. Some portraits of Beethoven 
look like Napoleon — did the Corsican com- 
pose the Eroica? 

We are told that Byron, Coleridge, 
Beaconsfield, Bright, Hallam, Dickens, 
Whittier, and others have doubted Shake- 
speare's authorship. This claim resolves 
itself into the wonderment exhibited by 
these men over the fact that one born in 
Shakespeare's station should divulge such 
brilliant genius. Such surprise might be 
more justly expressed over Burns, Chat- 
terton, and a host of others. The mother 
of Euripides sold vegetables ; Ben Jonson 
himself was a bricklayer's son; Marlowe's 
father was a shoemaker. Genius is the 
blue flower that grows upon the Alpine 
height, to be plucked by the wayfarer who 
went forth with no such purpose. It is 
the sudden star that flashes through the 
night unheralded by any trump of angel 
from the high heavens. It is no more pos- 

43 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

sible to trace the genesis of genius, than to 
unravel the strands of the rainbow or to 
trace ocean's waves to their generative 
cloud. 

^^A man's education is to be inferred 
from his actual works, not his possible 
works from his education/' writes Horace 
J. Bridges. But even admitting the ignor- 
ance of Shakespeare, would not establish 
Bacon as the author. The Baconians in- 
sist that whoever wrote Shakespeare's 
works must have understood Latin and 
Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish — they 
insist that Bacon had mastered all these 
languages, whereas the unlearned actor 
Shakespeare knew nothing of them. But 
that Shakespeare's ignorance is a myth has 
been already shown. Ben Jonson, who 
knew him well, says he ^^had small Latin 
and less Greek," whence it follows that he 
had some Greek and more Latin. His 
knowledge of French, displayed in the woo- 
ing of Katharine in King Henry V, is not 
anything to boast of; and his knowledge 
of Italian is somewhat doubtful, as the 
Italian stories supplying some of his plots 
had all become accessible in English trans- 
lations, except the sources of Othello and 
The Merchant of Venice. His acquaint- 
ance with Spanish is still more problema- 
tic; Montemayor, who furnished the sug- 
gestion for The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 

44 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

had been translated into English shortly 
before Shakespeare made use of that ma- 
terial. Still, aside from his schooling, 
there is nothing essentially improbable in 
Shakespeare's having acquired a certain 
facility in all these languages, living in a 
large seaport where ships and sailors of 
every nation came together. There is a 
strong probability that in the plague year 
1603 he may have visited Italy; and if he 
did so, he probably went through France, 
or more likely through Germany, which 
many companies of English comedians vis- 
ited about that time. Certainly Jakob 
Ayrer, a Nuremberg poet, either knew of 
The Tempest^ or else Shakespeare knew of 
Ayrer 's Beautiful Sidea. I like to think 
that possibly Shakespeare may have met 
this disciple of Hans Sachs and discussed 
with him, over a stoup of foaming Bava- 
rian beer, the decay of the drama, since the 
inspired cobbler had been laid to rest. 

It is a sad mistake to assume that su- 
perior erudition was required to write the 
works ascribed to Shakespeare. They 
contain nothing that any man of average 
intelligence might not have learned in five 
or six years of miscellaneous reading. 
There are hundreds of blunders and incon- 
sistencies, from the clock which strikes 
three in Julius Caesar to the cannons in 
Macbeth, the seacoast of Bohemia, etc., 

45 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

which SO learned a scholar as Bacon would 
never have let pass. Would he let Hector 
talk of Aristotle eight centuries before the 
Stagirite was born, or make Giulio Ro- 
mano, born in the year of America's dis- 
covery, contemporaneous mth the Delphic 
Oracle, which Theodosius abolished A. D. 
392? Would he pass sixpences as current 
coin in Ephesus, or make allusion to spec- 
tacles in King Lear — a tragedy which 
plays ^^when Joas reigned in Juda,'' while 
spectacles were probably invented about 
1290 A. D.? 

Shakespeare made these blunders; 
Bacon would not have made them. It is 
not the learning that is in Shakespeare's 
plays that makes them the rarest jewels in 
the world's literature. It is the magical 
mastery of language, the deep insight into 
the souls of men and women, the marvelous 
dramatic power in every scene and char- 
acter, that puts the plays upon a pinnacle. 
These things Bacon did not have, while 
the learning which we know he had is not 
in evidence in the plays any more than 
his laborious touch. 

In a letter to Sir Tobie Matthew, who 
translated the Essays into Italian, Bacon 
says : 

*^My great work goeth forward; and af- 
ter my manner, I alter ever when I add. 



46 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

So that nothing is final until all be fin- 
ished. ' ' 

It is said that Bacon rewrote the Essays 
thirty times. Rawley saw at least twelve 
copies of the Instauratio, revised year by 
year. This, as we learn from Jonson's 
sneering criticism, was entirely different 
from the literary method of Shakespeare, 
who rarely altered a line. When Heminge 
and Condell thought to praise Shake- 
speare's fluency, saying they had ''scarce 
received from him a blot in his papers,^' 
Jonson vehemently wished that he ''had 
blotted a thousand lines.'' 

Jonson was one of Shakespeare's 
friends, one with whom he had many wit 
combats at the Mermaid Tavern, and he 
owed Shakespeare a great debt of grati- 
tude, for Shakespeare used his influence at 
the theater to secure the acceptance and 
production of Rare Ben's first play. Jon- 
son is one of those who have borne wit- 
ness to Shakespeare's renown, though the 
Baconians make much ado over the fact 
that, in a list of great English poets, he 
does not mention Shakespeare, but calls 
Francis Bacon the greatest of all poets. 
We know that Jonson was also a friend of 
Bacon's, and that he was somewhat en- 
vious of Shakespeare; we know that he 
said Shakespeare "wanted art," and had 
"small Latin and less Greek;" but in all 

47 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

that Jonson ever wrote he never voiced 
any doubt that his friend Shakespeare had 
produced the plays, and it is to him we owe 
the verdict : ^^He was not for an age, but 
for all time.'' 

The cool assertion that whoever wrote 
Shakespeare must have been a lawyer, be- 
cause the plays abound in judicial argu- 
ments and legal allusions, all exhibiting 
the mind of a great jurist like Bacon, is 
almost answered sufficiently by the tradi- 
tion that Shakespeare was in his youth a 
noverint, or lawyer's clerk. The Bacon- 
ians, however, in their efforts to blacken 
the Stratford man's character, crow loudly 
over the fact that he was continually en- 
gaged in lawsuits to recover loans or an- 
nex real estate ; and if this be so, he may 
easily have acquired his legal knowledge 
by association with lawyers, or from his 
father, who is known to have been involved 
in over forty lawsuits. One Baconian, 
when confronted with strong evidence that 
the plays contain hints of a lawsuit in 
which Shakespeare himself was interested, 
suggested that Bacon must have been 
Shakespeare's counsel. There are at most 
one hundred and fifty legal allusions in the 
plays, and they by no means justify the 
statement of Thomas Nash that ''the 
author of Hamlet was a jurist and the son 
of a jurist." He might as well have said 

48 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

that the author of The Tempest was a 
sailor and the son of a sea-cook. 

All snch deductions from the supposed 
knowledge or supposed ignorance of the 
two men lead much further than desired. 
For instance, it would be easy to show 
from many passages about horses that 
Shakespeare was a great lover of the horse, 
and knew horses better than most men did. 
There being a tradition that, soon after 
he came to London, Shakespeare was em- 
ployed at holding horses in front of the 
theaters, this by Baconian logic should be 
taken as proof that he, and none other, 
could have written the plays. The natural 
history we have in Shakespeare's plays is 
such as he would have learned in Warwick- 
shire and along the Avon; it is not the 
natural history derived from books and 
scientific research, such as most of Bacon's 
was. The medical lore contained in the 
plays also is empiric; not such learned 
matter as Bacon had excogitated. 

The utterly unpoetic bent of Bacon's 
mind, apart from the proof afforded by his 
so-called poems, is shown by the fact that 
in all his writings he makes no mention of, 
or reference to, any contemporary English 
poet — not Shakespeare, nor Spenser, nor 
Chaucer, nor Sidney, nor any other of the 
golden-throated choir that made his age 
the most illustrious since the days of Peri- 

49 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

cles. Poetry was to him a sealed book — 
with all his scholarship he does not appear 
to have heard of Dante or Petrarch, of 
Eonsard or de Bellay, nor does he often 
allude to Ovid or Virgil, with whose poetry 
Shakespeare was saturated. Eead Bacon's 
essay on Love — love, which he called ^Hhe 
child of folly ; ' ' then read Romeo and Juliet 
— it is not possible to conceive of the same 
pen writing both. Read Bacon's masque, 
The Marriage of the Thames and the 
Rhine, and then read any of the interludes 
in Shakespeare's plays — the stilted classi- 
cism of the one and the romantic grace of 
the others afford a most instructive con- 
trast. ^^ There is as great a difference 
between Shakespeare and Bacon," writes 
Walter Savage Landor, ^'as between an 
American forest and a London timber- 
yard.'' Gruff old Thomas Carlyle just 
about hit the nail on the head when he 
bluntly told poor Delia Bacon: '^Your 
Bacon could have created the earth as 
easily as Hamlet. ^ ^ 

Eventhe moral character of the men is 
fundamentally dissimilar. Bacon's in- 
gratitude and treachery toward his friend 
and benefactor Essex is a black blot upon 
his fame. One might paraphrase the 
words of Antony: ^^For Essex, as you 
know, was Bacon^s angel." When Essex 
became involved in a conspiracy against 

50 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Queen Elizabeth, Bacon assisted the prose- 
cuting attorney, and it was Bacon's mer- 
ciless argument that sent Essex to the axe. 
No compunction restrained the brilliant 
and self-seeking man from this much-cen- 
sured action, which rendered him very un- 
popular in England, and afterward he 
wrote a book to malign the friend he had 
slain. What was Shakespeare's attitude 
under similar circumstances? Southamp- 
ton, to whom was dedicated Venus and 
Adonis, was involved in the same conspir- 
acy, and was exiled. Shakespeare, though 
a favorite at the court of Queen Elizabeth, 
is the only one of the noted poets of that 
time who wrote no threnody of grief when 
the Queen died — and the reason commonly 
assigned for this was her harsh treatment 
of his friend and patron, who was recalled 
when James ascended the throne. Here 
we see Shakespeare, the warm-hearted and 
impulsive player, in contrast with the cold- 
blooded and calculating lawyer. It was 
utterly unlike Bacon to put friendship 
ahead of policy and pride ahead of profit . 
There probably never has been another in- 
tellect as masterful as Bacon's coupled 
with a heart so pusillanimous and grov- 
eling. His abject humility is almost ori- 
ental — Pope called him the ''meanest of 
mankind/^ 



51 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

To my mind there is one conclusive chain 
of evidence which shows the great plays 
were written by the actor William Shake- 
speare. One might possibly conceive of 
Bacon's having written them, and using 
another man's name, but certainly if he 
had written them, this lawyer would never 
have permitted another man to reap the 
rew^ards . Bacon was chronically hard up ; 
he was once arrested in the street for a 
debt; he was a prodigal spendthrift, who 
as judge accepted bribes to make ends 
meet ; when he died he owed more than one 
hundred thousand dollars, equivalent to 
nearly a million in our day. Shakespeare, 
on the other hand, accumulated a consider- 
able fortune as the result of his various 
activities — as playwright, as player, as 
manager. During his best years his in- 
come has been estimated at six hundred 
pounds or about three thousand dollars a 
year, equivalent to nearly twenty-five 
thousand in our day. Now if Lord Bacon 
wrote the plays, why did he not 'Hake the 
cash," even though he '4et the credit go"? 

The other argument, to my mind no less 
conclusive, is that the plays were undoubt- 
edly written by an actor, by a man famil- 
iar with the traditions of the stage, by a 
man who had one eye upon the people in 
the pit, and the other upon the pile of coin 
in the box-office. Bacon knew almost 

52 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

nothing of the theater. In the same year 
that saw the appearance of the First Folio, 
Bacon wrote that "the drama had flour- 
ished in ancient days, but now was in 
neglect." At that very time there were 
fourteen theaters in London, giving daily 
performances before many thousands, and 
producing plays by a galaxy of dramatists 
whose like the world had not seen since 
the days of Sophocles and Menander. The 
author of the Shakespeare plays shows 
that he is a player even by his fondness 
for similes of the theater. It would never 
occur to a lawyer like Bacon to write the 
picturesque apologue of life uttered by the 
melancholy Jaques : 

"All the world's a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players. 
They have their exits and their entrances, 
And one man in his time plays many parts, 
His acts being seven ages." 

None but an actor, and a good one, could 
have written the advice to the players in 
Hamlet. None but an actor would have 
thought of Macbeth 's pathetic figure of 
Life as 

"A poor player 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage 
And then is heard no more." 

None but an actor would or could have 
written the delicious comedy scenes in A 
Midsummer Night ^s Dream, where the ef- 

53 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

forts of amateurs are mocked with true 
professional superiority. None but a 
share-owner in a theater would have scored 
the rivalry of the children's companies, 
which were hurting the regular play- 
houses, as Shakespeare scores them in 
Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. There 
is even a reference to ^^a fellowship in a 
cry of players'' by Hamlet, with an appre- 
ciation of the difference in value between 
^^half a share" and "sl whole one," which 
points to Shakespeare the manager. 

ParoUes, in All's Well That Ends Well, 
making sport of Captain Dumaine's ^^ex- 
pertness in war," declares that ^^he has 
led the drum before the English trage- 
dians." It may be that we have here a 
reminiscence of a continental tour, and 
probably an allusion to the players' parade 
through the towns they visited. 

"As in a theater, the eyes of men 
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, 
Are idly bent on him that enters next, 
Thinking his prattle to be tedious." 

This utterance, put into the mouth of the 
king's uncle, the Duke of York, in Richard 
11, is another of those similes from the 
playhouse which show Shakespeare to have 
been an actor. Take the lines — 

"Like a strutting player whose conceit 
Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich 
To hear the wooden dialogue and sound 
Twixt his stretcht footing and the scaffolage." 

54 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Only a player who had heard the hollow 
planks echo his haughty tread, and had re- 
joiced in the noise he was making to im- 
press the ears of his audience, could have 
written these lines in Troilus and Cressida. 
None but an actor could have portrayed 
stage-fright as he does in Sonnet XXIII : 

"As an imperfect actor on the stage, 
Who with his fear is put beside his part." 

Two actors of Shakespeare's company, 
Lowin and Taylor, who survived him by 
fifty years, had been coached by him, one 
m the part of Hamlet, the other in Henry 
VHI. Christopher Beeston, another of 
Shakespeare's fellow players, told his son 
that Shakespeare ^^did act exceedingly 
well," and also that ^^he understood Latin 
pretty well, for he had been in his younger 
years a schoolmaster in the country,'' 
which may account for the pedagogic 
echoes in some of the early plays. It may 
be said that this testimony is hearsay, but 
it may be answered that hearsay of this 
nature, too simple to be invention, has 
greater validity than all the testimony ex- 
tracted by Baconian torture from sen- 
tences meaning something quite different. 

Shakespeare may have been a mere 
actor, descended from generations of no- 
bodies, or he may have been of the bluest- 
blooded stock in England — what care we? 
Mrs. Charlotte C. Stopes, one of the most 

55 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

indefatigable of Shakespearean students, 
contends in her book on Shakespeare^ s 
Family, that ^^by the Spear-side his family 
was at least respectable, and by the 
Spindle-side his pedigree can be traced 
straight back to Gny of Warwick and the 
good King Alfred. ' ' Little the world cares 
— no royal lineage could add to the glory of 
his name, which is Shakespeare. 

It is absurd to suppose that such a 
secret as Bacon's authorship of the Shake- 
speare plays could have been kept, since 
it must have been known to so many 
others besides Shakespeare and Bacon — 
to the actors, to the printers, to the 
families and friends of both men. To 
get over this difficulty, the Baconians say 
that Ben Jonson, Rawley, Matthew, and the 
writers of the Odes undoubtedly did know 
Bacon wrote the Shakespeare plays, and 
that many allusions to such knowledge are 
found in their pages. Since Jonson re- 
peatedly bears witness to Shakespeare's 
authorship of the plays — since neither he 
nor any of the others ever denied it— these 
fancied allusions are absolutely pointless. 
No one questioned Shakespeare's author- 
ship until crazy Delia Bacon started all the 
Donnellies, Gallups, Potts, and Booths to 
hunting ciphers, and as each of them has 
found a different cipher, we are warranted 

56 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

in taking them all with several grains of 
salt. The theories invented to account for 
Bacon's concealment of an activity he 
should have been proud to acknowledge, 
surpass the frenzied fictions of E. Phillips 
Oppenheim and the veracious revelations 
of Prussian spies. 

Two witnesses would suffice to put the 
whole case of the Baconians out of court. 
First let us call Francis Meres, born in 
1565, who studied at Cambridge and wrote 
a literary history of his period, entitled 
Palladis Tamia, Wit^s Treasury^ which was 
published in 1598 and written about two 
years earlier. Meres, put upon the wit- 
ness-stand, gives this testimony: 

'^As the soul of Euphorbus was thought 
to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty 
soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey- 
tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus 
and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared son- 
nets among his private friends, etc. 

^^As Plautus and Seneca are accounted 
the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the 
Latins, so Shakespeare among the English 
is the most excellent in both kinds for the 
stage; for Comedy, witness his Gentlemen 
of Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labour's 
Lost, his Love's Labour's Wonne, his Mid- 
summer Night's Dream, and his Merchant 

57 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

of Venice; for Tragedy, his Richard the 2, 
Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, 
Titus Androniciis, and his Romeo and 
Juliet. 

" A^ Epius Stolo said that the Muses 
would speak with Plautus' tongue, if they 
would speak Latin ; so I say that the Muses 
would speak with Shakespeare's fine filed 
phrase, if they would speak English. ' ' 

Francis Meres was a scholar, writing in 
mature years, in the midst of the matters 
he describes — a competent reporter of the 
current knowledge of his age. His evidence 
outweighs a hundred guesses and a hun- 
dred doubts. But let us put Francis Bacon 
himself on the witness stand, to testify as 
to his ability to write poetry. He boasts in 
his Apology concerning Essex that he once 
prepared a sonnet, '^and I remember I 
shewed it to a great person, and one of my 
lord's nearest friends who commended it." 
We demand to see this sonnet, but it is not 
among the exhibits of the case. At last the 
witness produces a real poem which he 
wrote, and which was published in a collec- 
tion by Thomas Farnaby in 1629. Here it 
is: 

The world's a bubble, and the life of man 
Less than a span, 

58 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

In his conception wretched from the wombe, 

So to the tombe; 
Curst from the cradle, and brought up to yeares 

With cares and feares. 
Who then to frail mortality shall trust, 
But limmes the water, or but writes in dust. 

Yet, since with Sorrow here we live opprest, 

What life is best? 
Courts are but only superficial Schooles 

To dandle Fooles : 
The Rurall parts are turn'd into a Den 

Of savage men : 
And where's a City from all Vice so free, 
But may be termed the worst of all the three? 

Domesticke Cares afflict the Husband's Bed, 

Or paines his Head: 
Those that live single, take it for a Curse, 

Or doe things worse: 
Some would have Children, those that have them none; 

Or wish them gone : 
What is it then to have, or have no W^ife, 
But single Thraldome, or a double Strife? 

Our owne Affections still at home to please. 

Is a Disease: 
To crosse the Sea to any forraigne Soile, 

Perils and Toile : 
Warres with their noyse affright us : when they cease, 

Ware worse in Peace : 
What then remaines? but that we still should cry, 
Not to be borne, or being borne, to dye. 

After consideration of this poem, no 
doubt a genuine production of Francis Ba- 
con's, we should be ready to acquit him at 

59 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

once of the charge against him, that he 
forged the works of William Shakespeare. 
He might be capable of producing the 
works of Isaac Watts or Michael Wiggles- 
worth, but hardly any higher flights. No 
other witnesses are needed. 

The Baconian theory is the abdication of 
common-sense and the apotheosis of hum- 
bug. Started by Delia Bacon, encouraged 
by the Potts and the Donnellies, the para- 
dox has fascinated such minds as Lord 
Palmerston, Wilhelm Preyer, and Fried- 
rich Nietzsche. It even became fashion- 
able in certain pseudo-literary circles to 
doubt whether Shakespeare could have 
written the plays, and to admit that Bacon 
might have done so. What is the value of 
the testimony of a hundred people who do 
not know? Even though Theodore Roose- 
velt and Doctor Munyon, Ella Wheeler 
Wilcox and Billy Sunday announced their 
belief that Bacon had written the plays of 
Shakespeare, that would not alter the plain 
facts known to every sane man that knows 
something about Shakespeare. We know 
all the essential points of his life ; we know 
that the plays were produced at the theater 
of which he was part owner ; we know that 
all his friends and contemporaries consid- 
ered him the author, and that he gathered 
the financial rewards of authorship; we 

60 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

know that before he died, playwrights like 
Drayton and Jonson visited him at Strat- 
ford — for what reason if not to talk shop? 
And we know that after he died, certain of 
his player friends collected his scattered 
plays and had them printed as a memorial 
to the author. No one dreamed of con- 
necting Francis Bacon with them; no one 
to-day, who has read both Bacon and 
Shakespeare, should suspect Bacon of be- 
ing able to write Shakespeare, any more 
than Shakespeare of being able to write 
Bacon. They are two minds of entirely 
different metal. Shakespeare was a syn- 
thetic genius; he built up, out of all the 
materials accumulated in miscellaneous 
reading, a world of his own — a world 
peopled by a multitude of characters not 
even surpassed by Balzac and Dickens. 
Bacon's mind was of the analytic type, 
which takes apart the knowledge of the 
world, dissects its parts, penetrates into 
the vital recesses of truth. Knowing so 
much about both men, we find hardly a 
niche in the life of either, into which the 
necessary postulates of the Baconian the- 
ory would fit. It must be dismissed as one 
of the strangest delusions, the almost in- 
comprehensible aberrations, that the hu- 
man mind has ever been guilty of. It is 
merely another proof of the fact that any 
truth, however clear and venerable, can be 

61 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

obscured by sly insinuation and rancons 
denial; that any theory, however tenuous 
and absurd, will find adherents if it is pro- 
pagated vociferously and persistently. It 
would be far better if these people, who 
*^ mistake assumption for argument and 
possibility for proof,'' were to expend 
their misdirected energy in reading Shake- 
speare — especially the cryptic utterance of 
the Fool in Twelfth Night: ^^ There is no 
darkness but ignorance,'' and the signifi- 
cant, almost prophetic, exclamation of 
Puck: *^Lord, what fools these mortals 
be!^' 



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